Not really. No recruiter is trying to avoid a paper trail, that's not their gig. It's a reputation based industry, there's no limited liability like with corporations.
There's three reasons:
#1: The phone call allows them to get a read on your personality by listening to your tone of voice and your attentiveness.
#2: There's a whole body of research that says building rapport etc means the deal is more likely to get over the line, basic sales.
#3: Recruiters like to talk on the phone. The primary reason people get into recruiting is that talking on the phone all day sounds like a swell time to them.
Having worked with recruiters on the other side, I think the biggest contributor is a version of number 2 - they think they will get a better result via their amazing powers of verbal persuasion and charm.
In reality they are probably applying selection bias and only moving forward on the people sufficiently interested that they actually pick up the phone.
That sounds effective, they are probably happy with that bias. If people aren't interested enough to talk to them for half an hour then the outcome will probably be so-so.
Even if the selection part is true, it chases away people who cannot be bothered to interact with a human being for 20 minutes or so. High value is a different set of people with unknown intersection.
No, it is not people who can't interact with a human being for 20 minutes, but with tens of them. If it were an agent / talent model, where it is a somewhat large amount of interaction with a single individual, that would be one thing. But interactively sharing the same information with 20 different recruiters is just a waste of time that has nothing to do with an inability to be bothered to interact with people.
When I get 10 LinkedIn messages a day, no, I cannot be bothered to interact with each of them for 20 minutes. And since they all refuse to send along any relevant details whatsoever, I can't even cull that to the subset that's plausibly interesting.
I'll add that sales is about overcoming objections. This is done most effectively in real-time. Sales of all variants have a preference for real-time discussions because they can get people to agree with things and navigate the turning no into yes.
Right, this makes sense for the person doing the selling. And it's why it makes sense to have a strong bias against people treating one's career as a sales engagement.
I don't think that is true anymore now that several jurisdictions says that the recruiter must mention a number first on the salary. They would never do that if they can at all avoid doing so. At any cost.
There's three reasons:
#1: The phone call allows them to get a read on your personality by listening to your tone of voice and your attentiveness.
#2: There's a whole body of research that says building rapport etc means the deal is more likely to get over the line, basic sales.
#3: Recruiters like to talk on the phone. The primary reason people get into recruiting is that talking on the phone all day sounds like a swell time to them.